Castle in the Air
by The Duchessina
Summary: They built castles in the air. But they forgot the foundations. Emma/Carl. Oneshot.


**Author's Note: **This is dedicated to **Permanent Rose.** I hope I didn't ruin your new favorite pairing.

**Summary: **They built castles in the air. But they forgot the foundations. Emma/Carl.

_If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. _—Henry David Thoreau

**Castles in the Air**

It started with a smile. And that smile became a kiss and that kiss became a promise and that promise became a ring. And, before she knew it, Emma Pillsbury was Mrs. Howell.

She's still not quite sure how she feels about it.

Because her marriage was built on air, and who knows how long air can support something so important? Because while it started with the intangible, it ended with a heavy weight on her finger. And, despite the strength of her new husband, Emma is pretty sure that air cannot hold a ring up as well as it held up a smile.

And a marriage needs more than a smile and a kiss and a promise and a ring. At least, Emma thinks so.

A marriage cannot be sustained by air alone.

And Emma is afraid that her marriage—small and fragile and new, just beginning—will fall through the air that holds it up, crashing down to Earth and reality with explosive suddenness. She is also afraid that one of them will be carried down with it, leaving the other up high in the air, alone and betrayed. She's not sure which option scares her more: the one where she is the one falling, the one who light put _just a little_ too much weight on the air; or the one where she is left alone, high in the heavens, light as an angel and with a heart full of betrayal.

But there is one more possibility that scares her even more: the one where her marriage is even lighter than the air and it is swept away silently, like the mist when the wind whispers through.

A marriage needs more than air. But it is also true that air can hold something up—a smile, perhaps—and if the marriage blinks out of existence, then perhaps it was never there to begin with.

It seems that everything about this marriage-maybe-or-not scares Emma.

And maybe she stays awake at night, listening to her husband's breath, wondering at her impulsiveness. Never before had she asked the air to hold up something she had not built slowly, calmly, strongly.

And maybe she tries to make something else hold up her marriage because of her fear for the air. Maybe she tries for tender touches and soft words; maybe she tries for more than kisses, _deeper harder longer. _

Maybe she tries for numbness, a defense against the inevitable falling.

Maybe, just maybe, she tries for a baby, because even a baby is stronger than the air.

And, during this maybe-time, she realizes that she cannot hope for the air to hold, that she herself must make the ground reach the air, and give her marriage a base to stand on. She _wants_ it to stand. She _wants_ it to work.

She wants to have a marriage built on more than just empty space between two hearts that ache to be filled.

She really, really does.

She understands, you see, that soon even words will become too much for the air to hold. She knows that eventually, the words will be so heavy, so hard and full and _huge_,that they themselves will tip the scale of what the air refuses to hold. Most of these words—the words that will become too much to handle, too much to hold, too much to hear—will be the ones that stay in her heart, that she will whisper under her breath in the quiet and comfort of her glass office. These words will bear down on her, despite being left unsaid. And it is all she can do to hope the silent words will not make her too heavy to be held aloft in the air; she can only pray that the words may not be that _ounce gram molecule_ to send her _precious frail _marriage tumbling down like a house of cards.

Because air can only hold so much. And right now, she thinks it's holding all it can.

After all, even smiles and kisses and promises can fill the air.

(She'll never admit this, but sometimes, on her worst days—when she's tempted to scrub the apartment so clean that it twinkles in the light—on those days, she dreams about falling. She dreams that she's falling so fast, with so many screams and cries and tears that she can barely breathe. And she wakes gasping for the breath denied her in her sleep. On those days, she wonders if some God above is sending her a message, telling her of her impending failure.)

Somehow, it always happens that after those fearful nights her husband will grumble and groan awake, his stubble visible on his chin; and she is vaguely disgusted by him.

She vows never to think of air and palaces on those days.

Her marriage—their castle—was built in the air, forged by uncertainty and loneliness and hopelessness.

Built in the air, and sustained by just their breath as they kiss each other good night.

Emma longs for a marriage built on the ground, solid beneath her.

Her ring is too heavy for the air, she knows.

They tried to build a castle in the air, and it didn't work. They probably couldn't build a sandcastle together, and yet they tried to build one in the air.

Emma didn't know that she couldn't build a castle—much less a marriage—in the air.

She couldn't build anything in the air without also building the foundations.

* * *

Castles and palaces can't be built in the air.

Emma should have known better.

It started with a smile. And that silly little smile became a castle in the air.

It ended with the castle falling, falling, falling.


End file.
